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What is Website Speed?
Website speed is how long it takes for a website to load when a user accesses it through a browser and is important when starting a side income blog, as an SEO consideration and for a good user experience (UX).
To check your website’s speed for all devices, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights.
Website speed is an important factor to consider when running a website or blog, but it’s even better to consider it before launching.
Speed Considerations Before Launching a Blog
When planning to start a side income blog, a self-hosted WordPress site is used by about 40% of websites on the internet and recommended.
The WordPress theme that you use for your WordPress site dictates the layout of your site and each way of setting up the theme for your WordPress blog has different speed implications for the final product of your blog.
Developing your WordPress theme from scratch will result in the fastest version of your site. This is due to the bare minimum lines of code that are needed for your blog to function properly being coded, reducing file sizes being uploaded to your webhost and so is ideal for speed. However, for beginners to develop their site using code, it involves a steep learning curve, as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP knowledge is needed.
A customisable WordPress theme made by a developer could be used for your blog. Such themes created by a developer, would be made available for public use either freely or paid. If you can find a theme created by a developer that is simple and lightweight and able to align to your blogs needs, by customising widgets, menu’s, etc, this can be the best option for a blog, due to it being a ready-made option. It is however likely that even though it is made customisable, coding knowledge will help to make the most out of it and it may take some time to find a suitable theme.
A paid option is a theme page builder, such as Beaver Builder. Beaver Builder uses blocks and a highly visual, drag-and-drop interface for WordPress, allowing you to alter the layout of your blog based on content and has an $89 annual fee. This software is complex and while you might think that might mean it’s slow, it has been made to be performance optimised out of the box, allowing for fast load times.
Ongoing Speed Considerations for a Blog
File Sizes
Any unused code in your website files should be deleted to reduce file sizes and in turn improve website speed.
Webhost
A common occurrence when factoring in website speed for a website is choosing the wrong level of hosting to handle your websites resource usage appropriately. This can be adjusted through choosing the right webhost plan.
Typically, if your site is simple and lightweight, shared hosting from a webhost such as Namecheap would suffice.
If it’s resource intensive, perhaps using many high-res images or includes a large E-commerce store and with lots of traffic, consider using a CDN plan, also with Namecheap, for example. A CDN will deliver your website through a distributed network of servers around the world to your users.
Images
It’s a good idea to spend time choosing the right file sizes for images used for media and featured images, as those that are excessively large will take unnecessary time to load and images too small will have poor visual quality, negatively impacting UX.
Where appropriate, converting images to the modern formats WepP or AVIF, offers better compression for images without a visible drop in quality.
An image compression plugin for WordPress, such as Smush, can serve images in WebP or AVIF and also has the ability to lazy load images.
Using lazy load will stop images on your blog posts from being loaded unnecessarily until they are needed, improving load times.
Plugins
Too many plugins can slow down your website, so it’s important to deactivate and remove any you don’t use and only use those you need.